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Amazon Kindle Support – impressive

In the last couple of days I’ve been very impressed with how the Amazon Kindle customer support is handled – in fact I’ve been thoroughly surprised at how efficient it is.

I’ve been using my Kindle since September with no problems. One of my first purchases was the Independent newspaper and this gets streamed to the Kindle automatically every morning, when I wake up it’s there waiting for me. That was up until last Thursday when the download become locked in “pending”. I first tried to fix this myself by trying different wireless connections but the GPRS connection and two different wifi systems didn’t work. Neither did a hard Kindle reset (hold the power button on for about fifteen seconds) so in the end I emailed Kindle Support.

That evening I received two phone calls from unrecognised numbers and it turns out it was Amazon trying to call me (I have a rubbish signal on my mobile at home). They tried all the numbers on my account, including an old one belonging to my parents. This was all confirmed in an email I picked up the next day and by that morning both Independent papers (Thursdays and Fridays) had been downloaded.

So I assumed it was back in working order until it again failed to download on the Saturday, so I had a look back at their support. There’s a “phone me” option which I decided to try and this is what really impressed me. I clicked the button and it asked me my number. I put my home number in and clicked the submit button – almost instantly my phone began to ring and it was the support line.

A short recorded message later and I was speaking directly to support. Very impressive.

As far as the fix went: it turns out a simple reset of the Kindle fixed the Saturday download problem, the Thursday one was some other problem at their end, and with a little gentle persuasion they reimbursed my the cost of the paper (the “print” cost!).

Take note other companies! Amazon make it very easy to contact their support line, it would be nice if you all put this kind of effort in too!